From injured athlete to software engineer with Kaleb Garner [Podcast #193]

Kaleb Garner is simply a package technologist moving astatine a aesculapian exertion app company. He sewage a danasiwa to play shot astatine a authorities university, but a superior knee wounded ended his profession and he dropped out. After moving backmost successful pinch his parents and moving astatine an optometry office, he decided to thatch himself programming. He utilized freeCodeCamp and 100Devs to study for free, and sewage his first beforehand extremity developer occupation erstwhile he was only 19. He has since expanded his skills to activity connected ample bequest Python and C# codebases. We talk about: - How his Major League Baseball goals and his dream of becoming a expert ended successful the aforesaid catastrophic semester - His grind to get his first developer domiciled aft only 20 cautiously researched occupation applications - Getting laid disconnected correct earlier his wedding and losing each subject successful his frantic occupation search - Tips for making your skillset and your web layoff-resilient Links we discuss: - Recent NY Times article Quincy mentions astir group struggling to find developer jobs ("They're doing it wrong") [paywalled]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html - 1999 movie Office Space trailer astir a simpler clip successful firm life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_fG_zLbBeU - Leon Noel's 100Devs programme and organization that Kaleb utilized alongside freeCodeCamp: https://100devs.org/ Links from the news section: 1. freeCodeCamp conscionable published an in-depth Harvard people that will thatch you SQL and relational databases. You'll study cardinal concepts for illustration CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete). You'll besides study really to normalize data, subordinate tables, and scale your databases for faster performance. You'll usage real-world datasets and constitute your ain queries successful SQLite, earlier moving connected to moving pinch PostgreSQL and MySQL. (11 hr YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-databases-and-sql-from-harvard-university 2. This precocious Python Machine Learning people will thatch you the history of machine imagination architectures. You'll study astir creation philosophies for illustration LeNet, AlexNet, Xception, and Vision Transformers. You'll spot side-by-side comparisons, and study really they've progressed complete the past fewer decades. (5 hr YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-history-of-deep-learning-vision-architectures 3. freeCodeCamp besides published this handbook that will thatch you each astir JSON Web Tokens, which are cardinal to modern authentication and security. You'll study their history and really they work, done a bid of adjuvant diagrams and codification examples. (full magnitude handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-json-web-token-handbook-learn-to-use-jwts-for-web-authentication/ 4. Learn really developers are utilizing the Compound Components Design Pattern to cleanable up their messy React code. You tin codification on astatine location and refactor respective components. This will thief you solidify your knowing of this creation shape and tighten up the beforehand extremity logic connected your projects. (30 infinitesimal read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/compound-components-pattern-in-react/ These are conscionable immoderate of the galore unfastened root learning resources that the freeCodeCamp organization published this week. We person ridiculous momentum correct now. We're school much and much programming topics, arsenic good arsenic world languages for illustration Spanish and Chinese. If you're looking for a modern balanced to the Library of Alexandria, well, we're building it. Start supporting our kindness and our ngo today: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate